


The Indeterminacy of Love

by DonnesCafe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Chess, Codes & Ciphers, Daedalus - Freeform, Death, Ethics, Flying, Friendship, Game Theory, Games, Identity, Love, M/M, Metafiction, Passion, Poker, Pre-Slash, Resurrection, Scars, Slow Burn, Utilitarianism, a bit meta maybe, dust - Freeform, falling, icarus - Freeform, relationships, risk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 23:15:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1406212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DonnesCafe/pseuds/DonnesCafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What are John and Sherlock to each other? Does love have to be labelled?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Study in Connection

_I can perfectly well love what is not or is no longer, just as I can make myself loved by what is no longer, by what is not yet, or by something the being of which remains undecided…._

~~ Jean-Luc Marion 

**Chapter 1: A Study in Connection**

_The cane,_  
 _a compromise,_  
 _stands in for what he needs._  
 _The one thing to die for, kill for._  
 _Other._  


Hollowed out. No desire. No life. No words. Trapped in a sterile room, alone with his demons, looking at the empty screen of his laptop. His life as a soldier over. Noise, heat, blood, fear, exhilaration, guilt, life. Gone. He has seen terrible things. He almost died. His therapist talks about returning to civilian life, by which she obviously means normal life. The thought of normal life nauseates him. 

He could reach down and open the drawer. Any moment. A moment, a bullet, and he can escape the enclosure. He can't breathe in the space that had become his life. 

A voice filters through the walls. “John…, John Watson?” He comes up, slowly, peers outside the wall. Stamford. Coffee. Talking. Sitting. He barely remembers that past at Bart’s; it seems a century ago, like it had happened to someone else. He makes conversation, tries to be polite. 

Somehow, he finds himself looking into a thin, pale face. Upper-class accent, strange eyes, abrupt. Arrogant arsehole. Who the hell is this man and who the hell does he think he is? Irritation, cracks in the enclosure. The eyes reach in. See. Psychosomatic. Enough to be going on with? That or a bullet. 

~~~~ 

Army doctor. Troubled. Demons. Psychosomatic limp. No support from family or friends. Potential flatmate? Yes. Loner who won't bother him overmuch. Good to have someone in the flat, although he could afford the flat on his own. It would be good to have someone to talk to aside from the skull. He doesn't have friends, but this man looks mature, pragmatic, seasoned. In need of a flat and in need of…. Something else? Not sure what, but he wouldn’t be demanding or difficult. He is used to coping. He will do. 

~~~~~ 

Clutter, things happening. In media res. A life. Better than the sterile room. “If you’ll be needing two bedrooms?” Of course, he says, of course. That pale face, dark hair. Twitchy, movement, energy. Life. He sits in the chair. Comfortable. Images suddenly of what it might be like in a single bedroom. His fingers brush the dark hair away from that white face, lips on the long neck, covering that unlikely bow of a mouth. Stopping the words that continually flow from it. Letting those movements move him, move in him. This man could break through… anything. And, he asks himself, just where had _that_ come from? And why? He hasn't thought about sex in a while, certainly not with a man. He shakes his head and opens the paper. 

~~~~ 

He hesitates on the stairs. He needs help, needs someone at crime scenes. Not Anderson. This man is a doctor. Compact, competent in spite of his limp, direct gaze. And he's here. Fortuitous. Sherlock is used to being alone, used to rejection. But this man's eyes contain death and sorrow and.... uncommon things. “Oh, god, yes.” Oh. god. yes. He sees his own reflection in those sad, steady eyes. Sees something else. He's not sure what. Not being sure intrigues him.

~~~~~ 

“You’re very loyal, very quickly.” Who in Christ's name is this relic of Empire in the three-piece suit? No, just not interested. But he is interested. Not in the bribery but in the whole situation. Interesting to think how long it has been since he was interested in anything. He feels the stirrings of engagement. Life. Even loyal-very-quickly. Sherlock Holmes is the only thing that has made him not want to die in many months. The man is not boring. Unusual, brilliant. Different. The opposite of dead. If it comes to a choice, he is definitely on Sherlock’s side, whatever it is. Being in Afghanistan had made him question his judgment in choosing sides. Right now, however, he has a moment of clarity. Life instead of death is his side. 

If it takes someone else’s death to preserve the life that he has, suddenly and quite mysteriously, come to care about, so be it. Is it his own life or Sherlock's that he is thinking about? They seem interrelated, which makes very little sense. 

~~~~~ 

Does he care about his life? That question has always puzzled him. If life is proving his superior intellect, he has always already lost that contest to Mycroft. The high of drugs or the high of the game seem too little to sustain a life, but he hasn't come upon any other definitive answer to what his life might be. As an intellect, he is usually bored. Cruelly, often almost fatally, bored. He holds up death, the power of life and death. He can choose. He is alone, and he can choose. 

A moment, a bullet, a breach in his enclosure. A neat hole, opening out into something else. Fractures in the glass, new fault lines. There is someone else, outside, other. Someone else sees him. As an idiot. That is…. novel. Dinner, beginnings, confusion. Other.


	2. Encryption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emotions are a matter of interpretation. John and Sherlock begin the process of decryption.

_Love’s mysteries in souls do grow/ but yet the body is his book._  
~~ John Donne  


**Chapter 2: Encryption**  


_Windows_  
 _or ciphers? Eyes._  
 _Read soul or mystery,_  
 _subject to interpretation,_  
 _cryptic._  


~~~~~  


Body still in the chair, face half-hidden behind a book. Reads as withdrawal, focus. The scratch in the table, a sign of heedlessness. The offer of the card could be interpreted as laziness, heedlessness, or trust. Using his computer, breaking the password. Laziness, heedlessness, lack of boundaries. Using his computer, using him as a shopping service. Read self-absorbed. Abstracted eyes. Read disconnect. 

~~~~~ 

Colleague. He has made a mistake, misread the clues. He has never had a friend, and he has never been good at reading the signs of emotion. Dead bodies are easy, living ones somewhat harder. Clothes, status, occupation, history. Easy. Fleeting signs in eyes and mouth are hard. He thought the admiration had been personal, that the bullet had been specific. For him. An equally likely reading was that John Watson’s moral compass and skill set would have resulted in the same actions in the same circumstances to save any life. John didn’t meet his eyes, his mouth formed a tight, thin line. When he shook hands with Sebastian, crinkles around the eyes, smile. So, flatmates. Still better than the skull. 

~~~~~ 

Looking from Sebastian to Sherlock. Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge, intelligence, money, privilege. Mirror-images? Or opposites, one the sinister form. De-formed. Seb. One word from the past, mouth held differently, a hint of moisture in the eyes. Can he decode another bit of Sherlock? Not invulnerable. Not a heartless bastard? Something vulnerable under the arrogance? 

~~~~~ 

The key to cracking ciphers is correspondence, finding the relationship between two (seemingly) unrelated things. The algorithm that bridges the gap. Adrenaline. Sweat prickling on his forehead, tightness in his chest, breath quickened. He calculates the algorithm and makes the connection. The correspondence between the yellow slash on the window (dead.man) and his own emotion (dead.friend). He may not be John’s friend, but John is not just his flatemate. He had thought emotions were foreign to him, but they were just encrypted.


	3. Game Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Game theory tends to assume that each player will make rational decisions based on utility. Does love? Moriarty, John, and Sherlock are playing games. Not necessarily the same one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Tammany for the conversation about John, war, and comradeship.

“…inefficiency should not be associated with immorality. A utility function for a player is supposed to represent everything that player cares about, which may be anything at all.” _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ , “Game Theory” 2.7 _On Interpreting Payoffs: Morality and Efficiency in Games._  


 **Chapter 3: Game Theory**

_In chess,_  
 _speculative_  
 _sacrifice is risky._  
 _And if the king offers himself?_  
 _New game._  


Sherlock actually has tears in his eyes, talking to Monkford’s wife. Janus, two-faced. He can feign caring when it suits him. His habitual case-face is almost blank in its intensity of focus, nothing wasted on outer displays. John has seen other faces. Angry about the solar system thing, faintly amused at Mrs. Hudson, sparkling joy at the challenges of a problem. 

Sometimes when Sherlock looks at him, he read signs of affection. A smile in the eyes, a faint quirk of the mouth, a softening. Or is it just amused tolerance for his lesser intelligence, for the utility that is John Watson? He is useful as a sounding-board and for leg-work. Are all Sherlock’s faces masks? Poker-faces assumed if and when they are useful in the only game that he cares about? The work. 

~~~~~ 

This is good. He isn’t bored. Lestrade asks him if he realizes the bomber is playing a game with him. Of course. It has all the characteristics of a game. Goals: figure out the clues, solve the puzzles, prevent the deaths. Rules: time-limits set by the bomber, he has to solve it himself (although police participation was allowed). Feedback system: acknowledgement of puzzle solved, life saved, new puzzle, possibility of additional clues. Voluntary participation: yes on both sides. 

But what kind of game is it? Chess or poker? Chess is generally classified as a game of perfect information, everything on the table. All pieces are on the board from the beginning, clear positions, strict rules, the ultimate test of intelligence and strategy. Poker, on the other hand, is a game of imperfect information. Some cards on the table, others unknown. Secrets. Chance. Emotion is dangerous in both games, fatal to good judgment. What game is he playing? 

~~~~~ 

So the point of the game is distraction. People have died, and Sherlock is smiling. Disgust rises in him, and he turns away. The calm, assessing gaze. Will caring help them? The voice cool and level. John became a doctor because he cared about saving lives, had wanted his life to have some honorable goal. He had assumed that, beneath his tics and eccentricities, his flatmate had a similar goal. That he was a detective because he wanted to save lives or at least to find justice for the dead. Apparently not. Lives were counters in a game to him. Pawns. The goal? Apparently, simply the exercise of his considerable intellect. Goal: checkmate. Apparently the ‘caring lark’ was not of utility in the game that was Sherlock’s life. John quietly rethought his own strategy, folded his hand. Obviously he didn’t know the players well enough. 

~~~~~ 

John is disappointed in him. Fleeting hurt, ruthlessly suppressed. Emotion interferes with the work. His utility lies in his work. He adopted his own code of ethics long ago. It had been interrupted by a trial run of the philosophy of hedonism through drug use. That hadn't worked out well, so had returned to his childhood code. No god, of course. His code was rational, a combination of Jeremy Bentham and Aristotle. Bentham's greatest good for the greatest number. Aristotle's _telos_ , the greatest human happiness through the exercise of the virtues. A virtue is an excellence of being. His particular virtue is intelligence. His social utility comes from solving crimes, saving lives, bringing criminals to justice. Those are the goals of the game. Emotion has no utility, in life or in games. 

~~~~~ 

The stakes are suddenly personal, and he is part of the game whether he wants to be or not. Explosive vest, sniper, seriously creepy villain. Life with Sherlock is never boring. He holds few (no?) cards. Definitely a weak hand. When he played poker endless nights in Afghanistan, he learned that switching up the game, breaking patterns, was crucial. Sometimes when you have a weak hand, a large bet is the best move. He had also learned in Afghanistan that sacrifice was always a possible move in the larger game of war. “You all right?” Something different in the voice. He looks into Sherlock’s face. Not flatmate. Not colleague. Comrade. All in. 

~~~~~ 

Winning at chess requires sacrifices, giving up pieces to gain position or test a weakness in your opponent's strategy. A piece offering to sacrifice itself isn’t a strategy that players could possibly take into account. The game Sherlock thought he was playing suddenly changed. The one player that can’t be sacrificed is the king.


	4. Smoke Signals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where there's smoke, there's fire, but sometimes it's difficult to read the smoke signals. Mycroft is much better at it than either Sherlock or John.

_No smoke without you, my fire._  


~~ Edwin Morgan, “One Cigarette”  


**Chapter 4: Smoke Signals**  


_Mirrors_  
 _and smoke distract,_  
 _deceive. But trace the smoke,_  
 _effect to cause, it tells the truth_  
 _of fire._  


~~~~~  


“Somebody loves you. If I had to punch that face, I’d avoid your nose and teeth, too.” Love? Did John love him? Had he avoided…. She was an expert, obviously. Could she read John better than he could? Nonsense. John was obviously looking at her naked body with interest. Concentrate. 

~~~~~  


John lit the advertising flyer. He waved the acrid smoke toward the smoke alarm. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, he thought. Isn’t that the old saying about scandals? Once the salacious accusation is made, people assume the worst, assume the smoke had to come from somewhere, from something. Fire, passion, conflagration. In flagrante delicto, and with pictures to prove it. The alarm went off. Sherlock had said sex didn’t alarm him, but clearly it did. Irene Adler was Sex, and Sherlock was stuttering and unsure. 

~~~~~  


Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The carefully-wrapped gift and red lipstick indicated passion. Trace the clues back. Molly Hooper was in love. He opened the tag. “Dearest Sherlock Love Molly xxx.” He had been wrong, had been deceived, had followed the wrong path to the wrong conclusion. He had hurt Molly. He felt as if he had just kicked a puppy. A soft, small, vulnerable thing that had never done him harm. Shame flooded him. He apologized, but he was distracted. Then the text alert, the sound of orgasm. John said, “Fifty-seven, that I’ve heard.” John was keeping track of the Adler woman’s texts? What did that mean? He felt confused, grasping at deductions that eluded him. How many other signals had he missed? Was Mycroft right, after all? Was he afraid of sex, blind to passion? 

~~~~~  


Fifty-seven texts. The red box, Sherlock’s white face. “Do you ever reply?” What had just come out of his mouth? John realized he sounded like a jealous lover, keeping track, intrusive, suspicious. Bloody hell. He was just concerned, he told himself. Sherlock was behaving strangely. He had apologized to Molly. Sherlock never apologized. The fact that he even realized that he had hurt her was unusual. Was he becoming more attuned to emotion because he felt something for Irene Adler? Bloody hell. 

~~~~~  


She was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was a challenge, and she was dead. The beautiful face unrecognizeable, the body still, the fire gone out. She hadn’t had the whip hand over death after all. He felt as cold as the air in the morgue. Mycroft offered him a cigarette. Why, in God's name? Oh. Mycroft thought he was involved. Well, perhaps he was. There was something about Irene Adler that he had admired. Passion, risk, fire, sex. But Mycroft was mistaken. He didn’t want her. He wanted to be her, at least the animal part of her. His intellect was superior, but he had liked her fire. A pity she was a whore, and a great pity she was dead. He took the cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew out the smoke. It drifted in the air, as insubstantial as he felt at the moment. 

“Do you ever wonder if there’s something wrong with us?” The question was rhetorical. He knew there was something wrong with them. If intellect and passion could never meet, they were condemned to living half-lives. Low-tar lives. Lives with the risks precisely calibrated, the advantages carefully weighed. 

~~~~~  


Irene Adler, returned from the dead, the expert in sex and passion and obsessions, was assuming that he was jealous. He was, God help him. She said that he and Sherlock were a couple. He wasn’t gay. “Look at us both,” she said. Look at them both. Moths to the flame. Drawn, fluttering around the fire. His mind had ground down to clichés. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Half of London thought he and Sherlock were a couple. Mrs. Hudson, his girlfriends, fucking Moriarty. They all seemed to read signals that he didn’t read. Or, he admitted to himself, was reluctant to read. Smoke signals, wispy, insubstantial. Notes of a violin mingling with the sound of bells, drifting on the air. 

~~~~~  


Mycroft was right after all. Caring was not an advantage. He had been seduced into longing for connection, warmth, fire. Sex. They had been the Adler woman’s undoing and almost the undoing of much more. As much as he wanted the life of wholeness he had glimpsed, he thought of Plato. The dark horse was too seductive for him and too powerful. It could have destroyed other lives. He could be half a self, or no self at all. Those things were for other people, not for him. When he had given up the drugs the last time, he had walled that part of himself away. He would do it again. 

~~~~~  


“He’s not like that. He doesn’t feel things that way.” Mycroft suddenly felt himself smiling. He carefully pursed his lips and looked down slightly to hide the smile. John Watson cared for Sherlock, but he hadn’t a clue, really. He had been particularly obtuse about reading the signals. A good man, loyal, but not subtle. Did he not realize why Sherlock pursued the life of a detective? Why he played the violin like an angel? Why he had been a junkie? Why the danger of drugs was ever-present? Why he was afraid of sex? Mycroft sighed. A tiny, almost undetectable sigh. He would have to keep an eye on both of them. This might not end well.


	5. Hounded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes even if you don't choose love, it hunts you down. Poor Sherlock.

_My harness, piece by piece,_  
 _thou'st hewn from me_  
~~ Francis Thompson, _The Hound of Heaven_  


~~~~~  


**Chapter 5: Hounded**  


_Monster_  
 _under the bed_  
 _or on the moor. Or worse,_  
 _lodged deep in the mind’s labyrinth,_  
 _a god_  


~~~~~  


Hound. One incongruous word and he had a case. A very promising case. Hound was an archaic word, a word not common in conversation unless one were a judge at the Westminster dog show or one of Mycroft’s crowd referring to the pack of hounds at the Ormond Hunt. 

He remembered studying a poem about the hound of heaven in fifth form. Old Peabody had loved it and droned on about it day after day. God pursuing some poor idiot down the days and years while he tried to get on with his life. Utterly ridiculous and sentimental. He thought he had deleted it from the hard drive, but fragments of it were still there. More than fragments, whole phrases. And context. Sitting by the open window, slight breeze, crack of cricket bats from the field, and Pea Pod’s voice droning _… unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace. ..All things betray thee who betrayest me._ Nonsense. 

~~~~~  


“Sorry we couldn’t do a double room for you boys.” 

“We’re not….,” John looked at the bearded innkeeper. Sod it, just take the key. The Adler woman had assumed they were a couple. Not just assumed. Known. Just because they weren’t having sex didn’t mean their... entanglement?.... wasn’t there for everyone to see. Everyone except Sherlock of course. What in heaven’s name had possessed him to say the thing about the coat collar and the cheekbones? 

He was going to have to edit. One wasn’t supposed to notice the cheekbones and the coolness of one’s flatmate. Friend. Sherlock had given him the nose-wrinkle of puzzlement when he said it. Damn Irene Adler. Jealousy of the dead was unseemly, especially considering how she died. It wasn’t as if either of them had had sex with the man with the cheekbones. She hadn’t seemed to think that sex mattered. Ironic, that, since she had seemed to be all about sex. 

~~~~~  


He had seen it. Blacker than the night sky behind it, a black hole sucking in reason. His hands shook as he lifted the glass of whiskey to his lips. The dark tide of fear rose in him again. Snatches of that damned, undeleted poem floated into consciousness. _I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind… I hid from him, from those strong feet that followed, followed after… They beat, and a voice beat, more instant than the feet…._ Feelings. Fear, doubt, love, passion. He had shoved them all down into the depths of the labyrinth that was his mind. They had a room in the mind palace with a barred door and a key that he had tried to throw away. Strange that fear and desire felt so similar. The fire in the gut, the trembling, the dampness prickling his forehead and palms. 

The Adler case confirmed his belief that feelings were dangerous. He rebuilt his defenses, brick by costly brick, but the boredom undermined him. He was sure Mycroft knew that he had gone to Karachi, and he was equally sure that Mycroft had midunderstood his reasons. It wasn’t that he wanted, much less loved, Irene Adler. It was to finish the business. He would not have her blood on his hands, would not have any lingering emotion associated with her, even guilt. As long as he had work, he could ignore everything else. As long as he could trust his reason, he could keep fear and love equally at bay. Without it, he could feel the pull of something other deep within the labyrinth. Was he the hunter or the hunted? 

~~~~~  


“I’m just your friend.” Oh, not even that. No mystery here after all. The clues he had tried to read were illusions, like looking at clouds and seeing faces or St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Adler woman…. He should stop calling her that since they were obviously a matched pair. Irene had said “look at us both.” No implication that Sherlock felt anything at all, just that the two of them were obsessed. He’d leave the deductions to Sherlock and go with the obvious. The things that even he, with his placid brain, could suss out. “I don’t have friends.” Take the man at his word. 

~~~~~  


Again. He had done it again. He had hurt Molly. He had just hurt John. Trapped. If he let emotion rule him, it would destroy him. What he thought he was. What he had been. If reason ruled him, he would hurt the people he.... His hands still trembled as he drained the whiskey and set the glass down on the table. Loved. _Human love needs human meriting….how little worthy of any love thou art…._ Phrases unwound in his mind, gentle and terrifying. 

_Naked, I wait thy Love’s uplifted stroke._  
 _My harness, piece by piece,_  
 _thou’st hewn from me_  
 _And smitten me to my knee,_  
 _I am defenceless, utterly._  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A riff on "Hound of the Baskervilles" and the Francis Thompson poem _The Hound of Heaven._


	6. Lament for Icarus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flying and falling.

_It was his idea, this flying thing._  
~~ Christine Hemp, “Icarus”  


  
 ****

**Chapter 6: Lament for Icarus**

_Feathers,_  
 _unnatural_  
 _to those who live on land._  
 _There were still scars on his back from_  
 _the wings._

~~~~~  


“I don’t understand, why would it upset _you_?" Why, indeed? He was just Sherlock’s … whatever he was. Assistant? Now Sherlock was flirting with Moriarty in the witness box. He hoped they would be very happy together. Bloody show-off. He was also flirting with… ah, there it was. Contempt of court. Contempt for everyone besides himself and his evil twin. Contempt for John, who had reminded him politely not to show off. Apparently he was above the rules for mere mortals. 

~~~~~  


“You look sad when you think he can’t see you.” He thought no-one could see. He took such care with the face he showed the world. He routinely edited almost anything other than boredom, curiosity, impatience with the stupid, engagement with the work. If he felt other things, no-one need know. Molly’s soft eyes were still on him, and he felt things stir in the labyrinth of his mind, hidden deep, under stone. He had built up his mind-palace so carefully, the monster at the heart of it imprisoned. He was, of course, both the architect and the monster. Moriarty knew that, because he had loosed his own monster to roam free. 

~~~~~  


John thought, for one split second, that he would fly. The coat billowed out and caught the air. Every night, when John dreamed it again, Sherlock hovered for a moment above the claims of gravity, above the shame, above the ruins of his life, above the limitations of human nature, above the earth. Then he fell. 

~~~~~  


Not on the side of the angels. Not an angel himself, so the sensation of flying only lasted moments. He chose love, the monster at the heart of the darkness, and he fell. Earthbound, sore, and shaken, he looked up longingly, for a moment, at the sky. 

~~~~~  


He had flown too close to the sun. At a time when his only relief had been opening the desk drawer in his sterile room and looking at the gun, Sherlock gave him wings to soar above the depression and the boredom and the futility that was his life. Together they flew, cloud-high, star-high. They looked down on the mortals below, laughed at death and pain. His wings had been borrowed, fragile things of wax and feathers. He touched the gravestone. They were both creatures of earth after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both Marlowe’s _Faustus_ and the wonderful poem “Icarus” by Edward Field raise the question about what would have happened if Icarus hadn’t drowned but had been forced to return to living a mundane, earthly, plodding life after his adventures in the sky. Poor Icarus. Poor John.


	7. Resurrection, Imperfect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death and resurrection can be problematic.

Dust in the air suspended  
Marks the place where a story ended…  
…And to make an end is to make a beginning.  
The end is where we start from…  
~~ T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”  


 **Chapter 7: Resurrection, Imperfect**

_Phoenix,_  
 _resurrection_  
 _imperfect, the bitter_  
 _ash of former selves clinging to_  
 _its wings.  
_

~~~~~  


Dust floated, shimmering in tiny flecks in the sunlight that filtered through the curtain. Dust is made up of a thousand things. Paper fibers, cloth fibers, cigarette ash, pollen, chemicals, pollution. Hair fragments. Skin cells. 

“He never let me dust,” she said as she shook the curtains apart. More particles floated free. Some of Sherlock was still here in the dust, of course. Tiny particles of his pale skin, his dark hair. Smoke residue from a hundred guilty cigarettes. Ash and glass from the explosion across the street that had blown the windows in and brought John running back to Sherlock’s side. Chemicals from his endless experiments. Imperceptible fibers from the soft grey t-shirt he sometimes wore before bed. Some of John was still here as well, floating with Sherlock in tiny shards, suspended in the air, floating as light and insubstantial as the notes of the violin that still seemed to hang below the ceiling. Infinitesimal fibers from the jumper he had been wearing his first night in the flat, traces of the curry powder he had spilled on the floor one night as he was trying to cook dinner, paper fibers from the cheap thrillers that he had read. A microscopic potpourri of their days together drifted in the air, suspended in time, suspended in light. If Sherlock were here, would he have been able to read their history in the dust motes, captured in a slide under his microscope? 

He told Mrs. Hudson that he was moving on, but for a long moment he longed to stay here with the dust. 

~~~~  


“So, John?” 

“Not really in the picture any more.” Dust filtered down as vibrations from trains above shook the ceiling. They floated over the bones of the skeletal face. Sherlock blew dust from the top of the cheap desk, from the ridiculous book. When he let the book fall to the desk, a cloud of dust rose around it. Words rose from him, as usual, as he laid out his deductions. Words swarmed around him like particles of dust. six months. shoddy. Victorian. museum. southeast. fire damage. sale. John. Words dry and insubstantial as dust. What did it matter anymore? 

He remembered Ash Wednesday services from school. The gritty cross on his forehead, the words from Job about repenting in dust and ashes. Was that what John wanted? His resurrection hadn’t exactly gone as planned. He tasted the blood trickling down the back of his throat again in his memory, bitter as ash. 

~~~~~  


“I went to your grave. I spoke to you. I asked you for one more miracle. I asked you to stop being dead.” How many times had he gone to that grave? Week after week, and each time brought back the first time. The coffin suspended over the raw earth. Mycroft was a traditionalist, so there had been a young priest, cassock moving in the soft breeze, reading from the prayer book. “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Sherlock; and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” 

John was not a religious man, did not believe in eternal life. But he had prayed for a miracle. Now he had it, and he was grateful. The coffin had been empty. But something of dust and ashes seemed to tug at him. The weight of the past, of Sherlock’s choices, of his own choices felt heavy on him. What price for his resurrection would they all still have to pay? 

~~~~~  


Sherlock had heard him. He had stopped being dead, but it was an imperfect resurrection. John was at his side, for now, and it was time to go and be Sherlock Holmes. His own name was ash in his mouth. He no longer knew who he was, suspended between endings and beginnings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from poem by John Donne, "Resurrection, Imperfect"

**Author's Note:**

> It seems interesting to me not to ask what Sherlock and John “are” to each other (friends, lovers, gay, straight, bi), but to think of the movements and passions of love that may come before actualities.


End file.
